Recently we passed 20th anniversary of the "moment of decision," an initiative to convert the wine newsgroup to moderated format. (Had it succeeded, the evolution of this group would likely have been different. Today the merits of moderated format manifest more often.)
Then and for years after, the wine newsgroup was the Internet's public wine forum (with thousands of postings by 1990).
If you're interested, orignal message ID's are
(Actually the IDs didn't have "news:" in them -- that's a recent addition for current software.)
I have the original files; there's also an accurate Google archive currently at
Note Steve Pope's 1987 comment (in the fifth message) alluding to email in those days (domain addressing wasn't universal). Also that the wine newsgroup's name change (from the original 1982 name net.wines) was news to him and "probably others." (It won't mean much to people who first saw the name alt.food.wine, but the same situation is even true today.)